SaveMICity Initiative Honored in Best of MichBusiness Awards Program
The SaveMICity initiative supported by the Michigan Municipal League and several partner organizations received a statewide honor recently by MichBusiness.
The campaign that aims to fix Michigan’s broken municipal finance system received the Beacon Award in the 2018 Best of MichBusiness competition. The contest is dedicated to recognizing those companies and individuals that make Michigan a top-notch place to do business. The award was received in the non-profit organization category.
It’s the second major award in recent months for the SaveMICity effort, found at SaveMICity.org. The program also received a Silver Certificate in the 17th annual Diamond Award program run by the Michigan Society of Association Executives (MSAE).
The purpose and goal of the SaveMICity campaign is to raise awareness among the public, business leaders, state legislators, and the media that Michigan’s system for funding its communities is broken and must be fixed for the state’s economy to succeed.
Across the country, Michigan ranks 50th—DEAD LAST—in investing in its communities since 2002. The results of this disinvestment are clear—crumbling roads, deteriorating infrastructure, cuts to local police and fire protection, and cost-cutting measures that led to disastrous consequences, such as the Flint water crisis.
After years of working within the existing paradigms, the Michigan Municipal League (MML), with support of the Michigan Municipal League Foundation, started the SaveMICity legislative and policy push in 2016. The SaveMICity effort was dramatically enhanced into a broader public relations campaign in early 2018 thanks in part to the generous support from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. In January 2018, the League began working with the Vanguard Public Affairs team to put in place a multi-year strategy to fix Michigan’s broken system for funding its municipalities and to take the SaveMICity work to the next level.
Two separate EPIC-MRA polls commissioned in 2016 and again in 2018 clearly showed that the public wants their tax dollars spent on local services, but there is a dramatic lack of understanding about how communities are funded and why they continue to struggle as the state and national economy improves.
Several additional components have been added to the SaveMICity initiative in recent months, including the release of a three-minute animated video that explains the issue; a series of shorter, 30-second videos to drive home important messages for cities and villages across the state; storytelling efforts; messaging training for a new group of municipal ambassadors; an improved savemicity.org website with fresh content; more podcasts; and an updated social media presence. A new video was created toward the end of 2018 featuring League members talking about the impact of the broken system on their communities. You can find all the videos on the SaveMICity YouTube channel.
Learn more about the program at SaveMICity.org.